Saturday, January 10, 2009
On this day:

Heresy on abortion from the New York Times

Marvin Olasky noticed a subtle lapse in the New York Times's pro-abortion orthodoxy recently. You'll have to read his article to find out what that was, but he goes on to ask a very good question:

Two positions on abortion are logically consistent. One states, with biblical objectivity, that the killing of small human beings, whether born or unborn, should be illegal. The other, as espoused by Princeton's Peter Singer and others, is subjective: Small human beings dependent on others gain rights only as their needed protectors give them. This means that not only abortion but infanticide up to toddler stage should be legal.

This is not to say that Americans can't come at least temporarily to an illogical middle position. Most Europeans have. In France, for example, abortion during the first 10 weeks is legal but discouraged; after that time, sharp restrictions set in. If the Supreme Court hadn't in Roe v. Wade gone to the extreme of legalizing abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason, we'd now have laws that allow for some abortion but do not freeze us into Court-dictated subjectivity.

Subjectivity: Right now killing an unborn child with the consent of the mother is legal in all 50 states—but in at least 35 states it is murder if a father or anyone else kills that child without the mother's consent. In other words, our law is based on the idea that unborn children do not objectively have value unless they are recognized as children by their mothers. Do we really believe that?

The problem is that even if we don't believe that, there's little we can do to amend it, since the U.S. Supreme Court has placed almost all practical options for restricting abortion off limits. The Court has written this grave injustice - if that's what it is - into the Constitution, and it is now the supreme law of the land.

Although it's daring of us moderns to do this sort of thing - placing man's law in direct opposition to the moral law - I can't say that it's very smart.